Recent editorials from Texas newspapers

We recently wrote in this space that the "no budget, no pay" plan touted as a means to get federal lawmakers to do their jobs is little more than a meaningless gimmick.

Now comes David Walker, a former U.S. comptroller general who leads the nonprofit Comeback America Initiative, with a promising proposal to get the do-nothings in Congress to do their jobs. His idea: "No deal, no break."

Few Americans are aware of how little time Congress actually spends at work. Walker notes it plans to adjourn for the equivalent of a full month this spring while our nation is confronting two critical deadlines: March 27, when the government faces a shutdown if temporary funding resolutions aren't renewed, and May 19, when the debt ceiling will rise. Plus, the lawmakers take a week off for every federal holiday and virtually all of August.

"The premise is simple," Walker says. "Stay in Washington and do your job and strike a meaningful fiscal deal that can restore fiscal sanity. And until that happens, don't recess."

For those of us in the real world, staying on the job until the work is done is no big deal. For Congress? Unheard of.

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Houston Chronicle. Feb. 13, 2013.

Cantor's reversal: Perry is probably wondering where he was when he needed him in 2011

It's not hard to imagine Gov. Rick Perry shaking his head, maybe even gritting his teeth, at the news that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.

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, is trying to plane down House Republicans' hard-edged reputation on all things domestic, including immigration reform.

"Where were you when I needed you, Mr. Leader?" Perry might well have asked, recalling that fateful Republican presidential debate in the fall of 2011 when he suggested that only the heartless could oppose allowing the children of the undocumented to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

The audience jeers and the push-back from his fellow candidates was arguably the beginning of the end to the governor's Lone Star-crossed presidential quest.

Now, here's Cantor, in a major speech last week to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, saying he would support a path to citizenship for those same children—children who were brought to this country by their parents and who lack citizenship status but are Americans through and through. Cantor, the Tea Party favorite who has burnished his reputation as the House's Mr. No—occasionally to the frustration of Speaker John Boehner—is now saying he supports the central provision of the Dream Act, Perry's presidential albatross.

"One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents," Cantor said. "It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and know no other home."

We agree. It needs to be done now. With graduation coming in a few months, students need to know their options.

Cantor's pronouncement was part of a package of proposals aimed at making conservative principles more applicable to Americans' everyday concerns. He said he wanted to "focus our attention really on what lies beyond the fiscal debates" and to create "conditions for health, happiness and prosperity."

Cantor's critics were skeptical. They immediately suggested that he's more interested in projecting a more empathic image for a beleaguered GOP than he is in working with Democrats to craft solutions to such knotty problems as firearms policy, health care issues, taxation and immigration reform.

Still, the change in tone is welcome to Americans disgusted with a stubbornly sclerotic Congress. Democrats also professed to welcome Cantor's more flexible approach.

"If House Republicans can adapt their agenda to match Leader Cantor's words, this Congress could surprise people with how productive it can be," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., in a statement released by his office.

We're a bit skeptical, as well, but it is true that an election thumping, not unlike a date with the hangman's noose, tends to concentrate the mind. If the GOP's difficulties last fall concentrate Cantor's mind on sensible solutions to the nation's difficult and divisive issues, including immigration reform, the nation will be the better for it. And, who knows, maybe even a certain Texas governor will benefit if he decides another White House run is in his future.

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The Dallas Morning News. Feb. 8, 2013.

President's unchecked power to kill

Rarely in American history has war-fighting been as complicated as it is today. The West faces a lethal Islamist enemy that knows no boundaries or rules. The front can range from the tribal areas of Pakistan to rural Yemen to the sky over Manhattan.

We must not oversimplify the difficulties of fighting al-Qaeda. The president needs authority to act quickly when the opportunity arises to attack a terrorist leader bent on mass killing.

At the same time, there cannot be two legal standards: one for regular citizens and another that only applies to the president and his senior aides. That's why an uproar erupted in Washington last week over the use of unmanned drones to execute American citizens on foreign soil.

An Obama administration white paper, uncovered by NBC News, offers a troubling justification for the September 2011 drone attack in Yemen that killed American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. The airstrike was specifically designed to kill Awlaki without any attempt to capture and put him on trial for links to terrorist attacks, including the Fort Hood killings.

The white paper does give a nod to constitutionally mandated due process but quickly discards the notion. The administration acknowledges that it can only launch drone attacks when an "imminent threat" exists. Yet such a threat "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future."

By this logic, "imminent" could mean weeks, months or years away. The targeted person need only to have "recently" been involved in unspecified "activities," the white paper says. Aside from writing and recording videos, it's not clear what activity of Awlaki's qualified him for summary execution without trial.

Worse still, the decision to kill can be made by an "informed, high-level official of the U.S. government," not necessarily the president.

Americans should be deeply concerned when unnamed individuals, operating secretly, receive the unchecked authority to kill other Americans. Doubly worrisome is the combination of this authority with the extraordinary penetrability and killing power of unmanned drones. Nowhere is off limits, and seemingly any justification is good enough if these unnamed individuals want you dead.

Congress has a right and responsibility to intervene. If existing wartime authority and counter-terrorism laws are too broadly worded, they must be revised to ensure the executive branch does not have unchecked power to kill just because this war's front lines are so ill-defined.

Congress should design a legal process that gives the president flexibility to pursue our enemies yet ensures that he honors constitutional constraints. At a minimum, some level of judicial oversight must be invoked to ensure the president has a judge's authority to proceed, particularly when it's an American in the drone's crosshairs.

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Feb. 9, 2013.

Give Texas state parks their money to stay open

If ever golden words rolled off the tongue of a Texas lawmaker, it was Wednesday in a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee.

"I just want to publicly say that I'm not interested in seeing any state parks closed," said Sen. Tommy Williams, the committee's powerful new chairman.

As they say, it's good to have friends in high places.

"We're going to work with you guys to try to solve this problem," Williams, R-The Woodlands, told officials of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Star-Telegram Austin bureau chief Dave Montgomery caught the statement for his report on the committee meeting.

That's not a promise from Williams, but it's as close to a thumbs-up as anyone in his position can give at this point in the budget-writing process. Budgets usually aren't finalized until nearly the last day of a legislative session. This year's session ends May 27.

Parks and Wildlife has requested $18.9 million in its 2014-15 budget to avoid closing as many as 20 state parks.

An early Senate version of the budget contains only $6.9 million. Tina Beck, an analyst with the Legislative Budget Board who is helping shepherd the department's budget through the session, told the committee that the early amount would keep only 11 of the 20 threatened parks open.

The remaining parks and one of the department's regional offices still might have to be closed, Beck said.

Of course, the heart of this discussion is the question of where the additional money would come from. That's always a frustrating issue in Austin.

This year, even though forecasts say there will be an $8.8 billion balance left over at the end of the current budget, plus an expected $11.8 billion balance in the state's rainy-day fund available for spending in 2014-15, top state leaders including Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus are trying to keep a lid on spending.

Conveniently, there is a way out of this dilemma if Williams and other legislators really intend to "work with" TPWD.

That's because Perry and the other top state officials also have been singing from the same page of another songbook. They all say they want to end budget tricks like the "diversion" of money raised for one purpose but shifted away to be spent on something else.

This is a perfect time to make that happen.

One of the most popular words at the Capitol these days is transparency. The best time to make the budget process more transparent is when money is available to pay for eliminating budget tricks.

When the Legislature authorized a sales tax on sporting goods in 1993, the revenue was supposed to be dedicated to state parks. Since then, the tax has raised $1.9 billion but only $661 million of that total has been spent on parks, according to the Texas Coalition for Conservation.

In most budget diversions, money not spent for its dedicated purpose is shifted over to the general fund to be spent on other things -- or at least made available to make it look as if the general fund is fat enough that the adopted budget can be described as balanced.

Either way, parks have suffered.

Sen. Craig Estes, R-Wichita Falls, who is chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Rural Affairs and Homeland Security Committee and vice chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, has filed a bill to end diversion of sporting goods sales tax revenue.

State Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, has filed a similar bill.

Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, has proposed a constitutional amendment to end the diversion of all statutorily dedicated funds, including the sporting goods sales tax.

It does pay to have friends in high places.

It's important to have friends in low places, too. Poll results released last week by a parks advocacy group showed that 87 percent of Texans place special importance on parks, even in a tough economy.

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The Eagle of Bryan-College Station. Feb. 16, 2013.

Same-old same-old isn't working in D.C.

One only had to watch the contrast between Joe Biden and John Boehner during the State of the Union to know that any lessons learned from the November election have been forgotten.

There was a grinning Vice President Biden leaping to his feet time and again at President Barack Obama's scripted applause lines. And then there was a morose and moribund House Speaker Boehner looking as if would rather be having a root canal—with no anesthetic.

In other words, nothing has changed since Obama was overwhelmingly re-elected and the House remained firmly in Republican hands. Any hope for compromise on much of anything has frittered away.

Sen. Marco Rubio's Republic response to the president was so predictable it could have been written months ago.

Of course, we didn't hear what we needed to hear from the president. There was no explanation of any plans for reducing the overwhelming federal debt that is dragging this country down and stalling economic recovery efforts. Maybe he has none. If he does, we ask that he kindly share them with the rest of us.

And, while it is good to hear that our troops are coming home from Afghanistan, what are the president's plans to keep us safe from terrorism, particularly if America's military is gutted by mandated budget cuts?

There are many serious issues facing this nation—immigration reform, security, a return to economic prosperity, health care, gun control—that it will take a coordinated effort from Republicans and Democrats alike. Sadly, with the Democrats the party of "been there, done that" and the Republicans the party of "not only no, but hell no," that doesn't appear likely.

As we have said many times in the past, this country runs best when governed from the middle. We all suffer when the ultra-liberals and the arch-conservatives are in charge. Surely they must be a part of the mix, but the compromises necessary to move this country forward will come only from center-right and center-left.

We don't expect politicians to give up their core beliefs and we shouldn't ask them to do so. But we do ask them to take a deep breath, exhale slowly and listen to what the other side is saying. They may find they aren't all that far apart,

Also, we ask—no, we demand—that they put the interests of this country ahead of their party and partisan politics.

We simply cannot continue along the same path that has led us to too many cliffs in recent years.